Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

What’s Wrong with the World
is dedicated to the defense of
what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of
the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the
Jihad and Liberalism...read more

An unacknowledged dilemma

Once the bonds of community have frayed, is it enough to merely withdraw the power of the state, and watch communities reknit themselves? Will the two-parent family revive, for instance, if antipoverty programs are pared away? Are there countless versions of, say, the Mormon Church’s welfare network waiting to spring up, if only the heavy hand of the state relaxes itself? Or is it possible that once community has frayed sufficiently, the state cannot simply withdraw itself without risking disintegration—but must, perforce, play an active role in the revival of civil society, by seeking to reduce the demand for government before it reduces the supply?

I tend to think that the state must indeed play an active role in "reducing the demand for government before it reduces the supply". Much can be done, for instance, to incentivize marriage and family - and to reduce destructive and pathological behaviors - before removing public assistance from dependent children and their non-working parent(s).

Comments (43)

Certainly. It's a false dilemma to say it's either (a) the state takes over social support network, or (b) the state is completely uninvolved in the social support network. Just as the famous "all that is forbidden is mandatory, all that is not mandatory is forbidden" totalitarian approach is a false picture. Why do we constantly lose sight of the fact that the state has many mechanisms of promoting and supporting without making it mandatory? The state can certainly support the intact family without operating the family, the state can certainly promote the social support network without running it. As we correct toward getting the state back out of running the network, we better have intermediate stages where the government provides encouragement and promotes it, without owning it.

Jeff, I hope you don't mean to ignore the fact that the current set-up of government welfare programs positively _discourages_ marriage. Many conservatives have pointed this out time and time again.

I do suspect - without being terribly knowledgeable about the topic - that the "set up of government welfare programs" involves a lot of anti-marriage and specifically anti-fatherhood prejudices.

However, I'm skeptical of the idea that the mere provision of material assistance to women and children without income is, by itself, a significant contributor to the breakdown of marriage, family, and community. Man is more than an economic being, and people marry (or not) for more than economic reasons. As I've said before, the primary contributor to child destitution (I do not say "poverty", because poverty is tolerable) seems to be sexual promiscuity and a culture of moral depravity among those who are least capable of absorbing the costs. Cutting off material assistance isn't likely to change that.

Well, Jeff, as you know, thinkers and writers have discussed this and have traced the unraveling of families in these situations to specifically those welfare programs that reward women for having children while not being married. Whether at this point "cutting off material assistance" is going to make them less promiscuous immediately, I think good arguments have been made that the breakdown of especially the black American family was originally encouraged in no small part by offering money to poor women for having children out of wedlock.

By the way, have you heard this anecdote, from an ER doctor? A young woman comes in in labor to the ER. In the course of her labor she says, "My momma says I'm the breadwinner." Upon inquiry the doctor discovers that this is what she means: She has children out of wedlock with various fathers. Her mother then goes to the relevant government agency and informs them that the daughter is pregnant and not a fit mother. The government agency complies when the baby is born, assigning foster custody to the grandmother of the new child with the financial perquisites thereof. Thus, the daughter, like a brood mare, is "the breadwinner."

Walter Williams and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom being just some of the people to make the connection between LBJ's beginning to subsidize illegitimacy and (surprise surprise) a precipitous increase in illegitimacy, with extremely negative consequences for the social groups in question.

As I've said before, the primary contributor to child destitution (I do not say "poverty", because poverty is tolerable) seems to be sexual promiscuity and a culture of moral depravity among those who are least capable of absorbing the costs. Cutting off material assistance isn't likely to change that.

And as you keep ignoring when making this argument, people choose to be promiscuous or chaste in no small part based on their ability to absorb the cost of their decisions. Welfare access for unwed mothers is tantamount to declaring that the state will subsidize them if they have sex with men who are not father material and get pregnant by them.

Not only is Lydia on the money on this one, but teen pregnancy rates have gone down steadily ever since welfare reform. There is no positive spiritual explanation for this, since America has become steadily less Christian over the same period of time. The only obvious explanation is that by retracting the reach and generosity of the welfare state, behavior did change.

At some point, the state must draw a line in the sand. People will suffer. Unfortunately, you cannot make public policy for a country of over 330 million without hurting some people with any given policy.

I do suspect - without being terribly knowledgeable about the topic - that the "set up of government welfare programs" involves a lot of anti-marriage and specifically anti-fatherhood prejudices.

Giving welfare to families without giving it directly to the father, and conditioning the family's continued assistance upon the mother staying with the father is inherently anti-fatherhood and anti-marriage. Anything else is the state coming in as a "second provider" in the eyes of the wife. The moment the wife walks (documented, serious abuse notwithstanding), the state should bring the hammer down on her and categorically strip her of every benefit she didn't earn through public service. If she takes the kids, then deny them too so as to deny her a means to receive welfare indirectly.

Since women initiate about 3/4 of all divorces (Google it, Jeff, if you don't believe me), this would do wonders to immediately prevent many divorces from happening. The single biggest reason why divorce is an option in many cases is because the thrill of a new love is not coupled with the uncertainty of losing access to the family's wealth (which no fault divorce, being abandonment, would deny them under a just system) and losing society's support.

Oh, Jeff believes you on the "women initiating divorce," Mike T. In fact, I'm usually the one questioning whether all those divorces are initiated for frivolous reasons.

However, as far as getting pregnant in the first place out of wedlock, I think we're on a wavelength here. There is a strange and unsupported ceteris paribus assumption that people make: Misery-making behavior is just a given or a constant, brought about by other factors, and our giving people "assistance" while they engage in misery-making behavior (for themselves and others) merely ameliorates the consequences of the behavior and hence is on balance good. It doesn't enable, subsidize, and hence increase the incidence of the behavior.

This assumption is almost always false.

Conservatives see this when it comes to, say, sex education in the school--namely, that it encourages risky behavior, that all else is not equal.

Now we just have to get those conservatives who are reacting against libertarianism to see that the same is true of "giving assistance" to people having illegitimate children, doing drugs, abusing alcohol, etc.

Jeff has a point, but it doesn't go anywhere near as far as he believes. It is true that there are people who, for example, will keep popping out kids left and right outside of marriage regardless of public policy. Heck, in Islamic countries people still have sex outside of marriage even when Sharia is the law of the land and a woman may be stoned to death for fornication. There are people who are utterly immune in the moment or in general to public policy's impact on them.

With that said, if incentives didn't really matter, parenting would be an exercise in futility because it would be a personality lottery every pregnancy. Poor Mrs. Jones... she drew the short straw this pregnancy because little Johnny just won't be polite and will probably major in Liquor Store Robbery with a minor in Wife Beating. Frankly, Jeff's argument would make more sense coming from a Calvinist than a Catholic.

Because human beings are creatures of incentive, you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. We subsidize illegitimacy and, as a result, we get more and more of it. The incentive system at work inside American welfare is an incentive system from Hell. It encourages and rewards unwed mothers for doing the very things that helped make them poor in the first place -- having children outside wedlock. Even though we know that poverty circles around broken homes, especially female-headed households, our incentive system says, in effect: "If you want more money from us, then have more children. But you must have them by a different father because, if they keep coming from the same father then we think that there must be a man around to pick up the tab. In that case, you'll have a much harder time trying to qualify for aid."

Statistics From Wikipedia:
An annual study in the UK by management consultants Grant Thornton, estimates the main proximal causes of divorce based on surveys of matrimonial lawyers.
The main causes in 2004 were:
Adultery; Extramarital sex; Infidelity - 27%
Domestic violence - 17%
Midlife crisis - 13%
Addictions, e.g. alcoholism and gambling - 6%
Workaholism - 6%
According to this survey, husbands engaged in extramarital affairs in 75% of cases; wives in 25%...

According to a study published in the American Law and Economics Review, women currently file slightly more than two-thirds of divorce cases in the United States. There is some variation among states, and the numbers have also varied over time, with about 60% of filings by women in most of the 19th century, and over 70% by women in some states just after no-fault divorce was introduced, according to the paper. Evidence is given that among college-educated couples, the percentages of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%.

As for the reason for no-fault becoming standard law, it was because so many couples were willing to fake an affair and commit perjury in order to get out of marriage. The first major jurisdiction to pass no-fault was (of course) California, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan.

The rationale that I've always heard from most sources was that many people felt at the time it would help reduce abuse because proving abuse is hard.

Abusive spouses aren't inclined to grant no-fault unless they already have a new victim, since it is mostly a jealous rage disorder. It is possible the stress of being unable to escape a marriage they detest could eventually lead to abuse by one or both spouses, but even in that case it is a type of rage, it just takes much longer to trigger. In that sense no-fault could act as a safety valve, but if they were both motivated to end the marriage it was easier to fake an affair and commit perjury than it was to let things spin violently out of control.

Well, Jeff, as you know, thinkers and writers have discussed this and have traced the unraveling of families in these situations to specifically those welfare programs that reward women for having children while not being married.

The difficulty here is that we're up against multiple correlations. At the same time LBJ was launching the national welfare state, the Sexual Revolution was just hitting its stride. I happen to think that a loosening of sexual mores, which preceded the Great Society, is more directly related to .... the loosening of sexual mores, which continued alongside the Great Society.

I don't think anyone here is foolish enough to argue that the Great Society caused the Sexual Revolution. That just isn't historically credible.

Of course, I do agree that public assistance makes the material consequences of bad behavior less painful, that it's a double-edged sword with unintended (at least theoretically unintended) consequences. No argument there. I wish you and others would acknowledge the good that can come of it as well. But that's an argument for another day. As Douthat makes clear in his review, we are where we are, our families and communities are shattered, and the only question at this point is whether removing state financial support now, without first making a start at putting things back together, is a wise or just policy goal for conservatives.

A lot can be done to incentivize marriage, family and community - and to discourage destructive social behavior - without forcing children and their families into economic destitution. Why don't conservatives tackle these ideas first? I'll tell you why: they violate our American sacred cows. They are moralistic and coercive. They infringe upon sexual freedom. Or they are things only an explicitly Christian state can accomplish. We'd rather see thousands of children destitute than shut down the filthy barbarian culture that deprives them of loving and capable families.

Of divorces filed in England and Wales in 2003, 69 percent of them were at the wife's behest. The most frequently cited fact for the basis of the divorce for women? Her husband's "unreasonable behavior." For those men filing for divorce, on the other hand, it was a two-year long separation that was the most frequent reason for their request for a divorce.

"Communication problems", "unhappiness", "incompatible with spouse", etc. That's much more realistic. Women have always been more likely to initiate divorce and always will be, whenever divorce is an option. The prohibition of divorce is not only God's way of protecting children, but of protecting women from themselves.

I suspect it's true that men are more likely to be unfaithful, but not by much. Steve Kellmeyer noted recently that in 1998, the American Association of Blood Banks surveyed 43 labs across the country and determined that 28.3 of children had no biological relation to their surprised fathers, who were donating blood for them.

And how would a willingness to undertake "moralistic and coercive measures" be consistent with continuing to give more and more money to the grandmother of the "breadwinner" in the scenario I sketched above? How about to women who continue to have more and more children, each by a different father? So far from being "moralistic and coercive," such rewards programs positively enable immoral behavior and do not even make a reform of that behavior a condition for continued receipt of largesse or even an increase in it.

What's amazing here is that you are accusing conservatives who are dismayed at the positive financing and incentivizing of immoral and destructive behavior (not just "making the consequences less bad," as you put it, but something much stronger) of being unwilling to violate "sacred cows" of conservatism because we don't want to be "moralistic." Doesn't that seem a little...odd? After all, we're the ones saying, "Don't pay women to have babies out of wedlock."

Steve Kellmeyer noted recently that in 1998, American blood banks surveyed 43 labs across the country and determined that 28.3 of children had no biological relation to their fathers, who were donating blood for them.

That is because blood banks mostly collect from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The average among all economic classes is around 10%. Meaning that it follows a bell curve and is vanishingly small at the upper end and close to 10% in the middle.

I don't know, lemme think. Have we even tried to educate single mothers who receive public assistance on the importance of marriage and chastity? No, instead we give them free contraceptives and tell them to go have a good time. So, for starters, let's stop mis-educating these people, give them the whole truth, and bombard them with some old fashioned shaming and moralizing. It's already paid for: only the message will change.

But it will be necessary to go further. The use of contraception and pornography should be as forbidden as methamphetamine for unmarried parents receiving welfare payments. Co-habitation should be forbidden as well - even for a single night. Abortion should be grounds for removal of children to foster care or adoption. The second child born out of wedlock should be adopted out, perhaps giving the mother up to a year to marry. Etc.

Much more could be done and should be done apart from these programs. Education reform, marriage reform, criminal justice reform, and others will necessarily be part of the solution.

And how would a willingness to undertake "moralistic and coercive measures" be consistent with continuing to give more and more money to the grandmother of the "breadwinner" in the scenario I sketched above?

Maybe I don't understand your scenario, but what's wrong with simply not assigning the children to the custody of the grandmother? Am I missing something? Perhaps your question is more generic. Moralistic and coercive measures may be totally consistent with continuing financial support to some households so long as rules are followed that minimize abuses.

What's amazing here is that you are accusing conservatives who are dismayed at the positive financing and incentivizing of immoral and destructive behavior (not just "making the consequences less bad," as you put it, but something much stronger) of being unwilling to violate "sacred cows" of conservatism because we don't want to be "moralistic." Doesn't that seem a little...odd? After all, we're the ones saying, "Don't pay women to have babies out of wedlock."

You're also the ones saying, "stop paying for material support to children who are already born" without regard to the parents' ability to reform or inability to provide.

You're also the ones saying, "stop paying for material support to children who are already born" without regard to the parents' ability to reform or inability to provide.

Actually, what we're objecting to is that the system as it actually is is tantamount to throwing money at the mother, not the children. If the government had programs with free clinics, charity thrift stores, etc. where those institutions would directly give goods to support the children (thus the mother never has discretion over the state funds to spend them on herself) when the mother takes her kids there, we would only be haggling over budgetary matters. It would be a non-issue because the welfare funds would be no incentive to a normal person to have kids.

Abusive spouses aren't inclined to grant no-fault unless they already have a new victim

No fault divorces are a unilateral decision, Step2. All it takes is the victim to file for one and the abuser has no legal recourse to stop it from proceeding.

The difficulty here is that we're up against multiple correlations. At the same time LBJ was launching the national welfare state, the Sexual Revolution was just hitting its stride. I happen to think that a loosening of sexual mores, which preceded the Great Society, is more directly related to .... the loosening of sexual mores, which continued alongside the Great Society.

I don't think it's really that difficult. You have two major factors working in tandem. We don't disagree with you on that. However, I think Lydia would agree with me when I say that you err greatly in not acknowledging the fact that the Sexual Revolution would not have been viable on the level it has been without social welfare spending. Sexual license has traditionally been the domain of the upper class because only they could afford to bear the price. I think even Chesterton commented on how the common man simply could not conceive of behaving like a rich playboy because (this was prior to the welfare state) the ruin it would bring him would be insurmountable.

Of course, I do agree that public assistance makes the material consequences of bad behavior less painful, that it's a double-edged sword with unintended (at least theoretically unintended) consequences. No argument there. I wish you and others would acknowledge the good that can come of it as well.

Actually you seem rather quick to argue that public assistance has virtually no impact on the decisions they make. You're far more likely to blame sex ed and free contraception than the fact that the women do everything they do with the full knowledge that they have a welfare state backing them if they willfully choose a man who is not husband/father material. So, I don't see how you can claim that there is no argument from you on the role financial incentives play.

Why don't conservatives tackle these ideas first? I'll tell you why: they violate our American sacred cows. They are moralistic and coercive. They infringe upon sexual freedom. Or they are things only an explicitly Christian state can accomplish. We'd rather see thousands of children destitute than shut down the filthy barbarian culture that deprives them of loving and capable families.

This is a very simplistic view of the problem. First of all, taking the moralistic perspective is not politically viable. Liberals would be more amenable to a libertarian style attack on the financial side than one in which the welfare state gains any conservative purpose (not that I would concede that it actually accomplish much there ultimately). Furthermore, some of your proposals, while good, are likely to be immediately nullified such as forced adoption. You'll be labeled a Good Little Chinese Communist so fast it'd make your head spin; these are the same people who cannot even tell immigrants that they cannot bring their entire extended family to the states.

The sad fact is that the financial side is the side we're most likely to see progress. It's the one where we're most likely to get a broad consensus that "things can really improve." Even most liberals are very squeamish about multigenerational welfare and would rather see unwed mothers not have whole families out of wedlock.

Even though I agree in general with the morality motivating your view, that view has no chance of implementation (and therefore of success). Wouldn't it be far better to theorize for the real world and to accomplish the good one actually can accomplish rather than to theorize for a world that does not exist and perhaps never will?

I say that because I also agree with Jeanne Kirkpatrick that the chief and most pervasive political error is "the fallacy of misplaced malleability" - the notion that we can re-make the world at will to fit the model existing inside our heads. It cannot be done. Here's why: Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously unfixable. Apart from the grace of God, it cannot be fixed, no matter how badly we might think it needs fixing. Things like re-education and family dispersions will not fix what ails us in this regard. To think it can is a matter of mistaken theology: It does not take proper account of human depravity and intractability.

If politics is, as many say, the art of the possible, we must be sure that the proposals we offer are, indeed, possible. The purist vision does not work, and God seems not to have prospered it historically. Without those necessary and objective historical indicators, all views tend to be too optimistic about what can be done -- again Kirkpatrick, but this time along with Burke.

So, given the ugliness and recalcitrance of human nature as it is, and the impossibility of changing it by policy, what is the best we can reasonably expect to do, based on the concrete historical indicators available to us now?

Co-habitation should be forbidden as well - even for a single night. Abortion should be grounds for removal of children to foster care or adoption. The second child born out of wedlock should be adopted out, perhaps giving the mother up to a year to marry. Etc.

Right, okay, so what you're saying is that you would place restrictions on the moral behavior of mothers receiving welfare so as not to continue to subsidize their repeated immorality and begetting of illegitimate children.

Now, without getting into either every single proposal or the feasibility of any of them, I tend actually to be on board with this. Naturally I would like to see welfare ended altogether and replaced by more personal means of help, but in the meanwhile, the less the government acts like a money machine and the more the government makes its largesse conditional on the kinds of things that a really good and wise charity would make it conditional on, the better. Not that this is realistically going to happen, but something like it might be more realistic than people think. I don't know if people are aware of the fact that some state governments presently make continued receipt of welfare conditional on the mother's having a Norplant implant in her arm. I'm surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit about it yet, but in any event, if the state can do that, why can't the state make requirements about sexual behavior to some extent instead?

But more can be done: For example, there have been studies showing that the live-in boyfriend's income, if he is not biologically related to the children, is not counted toward household income but that either a husband's income or that of the children's biological father is counted. This disparity should be remedied. All live-in males' income should be counted equally so as not to incentivize switching from boyfriend to boyfriend. I believe Michael Bauman mentioned something like this above. It also might not be a bad idea to make the income cut-offs at least slightly for married families than for an unmarried woman-cum-boyfriend, so that families with a married couple would find it a little easier to qualify for assistance. (Yes, this is me saying this.) That would be a direct incentive to marriage. Others can address whether this is a bad idea in some other respect--other, of course, than the direct economic respect.

You asked "why not just not give custody to the grandmother"? Well, of course I agree. However, that sort of automatic thing is to some extent built into the system. It's somewhat natural to try to place the children with a relative. That's probably a healthy instinct. But how can we root out situations like the one in that scenario? Obviously this "unfit mother" is continuing to live with the entire clan, and the grandmother is encouraging continued promiscuity by the girl in order to get more money and game the system. How can this sort of thing be stopped?

As for forced adoption, I definitely think adoption needs to be far more encouraged by pro-lifers than it presently is. Too often our crisis pregnancy help amounts to assuming that the mother will keep the baby without a father. Whether the state's forcing more adoptions (it does force some, more than I think most people realize, for women on public assistance) would result in more abortions, however, is a tricky question, as long as abortion remains legal. There's no way we're going to get the state punishing women on welfare for having abortions. That much we can say for certain.

Mike T's idea of replacing money with direct food and clothing assistance to the children to the extent this is possible is also a very good one. Especially when it can be done in a way that (unlike food stamps cards) cannot simply be taken by the parents and put on the black market in exchange for drug money.

By the way: My impression is that prior to the LBJ era unmarried women with illegitimate children (as opposed to widows or abandoned wives, for example) couldn't receive public assistance in virtue of having the children at all. Is this true? If so, it bears pondering. If true, it seems to have been a huge incentive for placing illegitimate children for adoption, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, we're building systems in the air here, but theoretically would it be possible gradually to "grandfather" back toward that? Perhaps women and children already receiving public assistance for illegitimate children over a certain age (too old to be adopted out without psychological trauma) would go on receiving it but with no increases or new subsidies for further illegitimate children born or conceived either by those mothers or by others, the idea being that they should be placed for adoption.

If the government had programs with free clinics, charity thrift stores, etc. where those institutions would directly give goods to support the children (thus the mother never has discretion over the state funds to spend them on herself) when the mother takes her kids there, we would only be haggling over budgetary matters. It would be a non-issue because the welfare funds would be no incentive to a normal person to have kids.

Not much time to respond at the moment, Mike T., but I like this idea. I also think you'll find that it doesn't change much in terms sexual behavior. The claim that welfare mothers are promiscuous so they can have babies in order get more welfare money just strikes me as a political fabrication. Maybe there are some who do that, but it can't be anything like a majority.

My argument really boils down to this: human behavior is not ruled by money alone, or even primarily. Somehow the Left and the "Right" in this country have got the idea that money creates all problems and solves all problems. And so we're back to what I consider the failures of procedural conservatism. What's the ultimate goal here? Spending less money? Punishing bad behavior with poverty/destitution? No - the goal is rebuilding the social fabric of this country. We won't get the right answers until we start asking the right questions.

The claim that welfare mothers are promiscuous so they can have babies in order get more welfare money just strikes me as a political fabrication. Maybe there are some who do that, but it can't be anything like a majority.

Maybe you should read some of the social scientists who argue that it has a bigger effect than it "strikes you" as having. Maybe also you should consider the impact of stories like the anecdote I gave. Are you really saying that that is just some kind of outlier, highly improbable, hardly ever happens? If it's that easy to game the system, why wouldn't people do so?

And so we're back to what I consider the failures of procedural conservatism. What's the ultimate goal here? Spending less money? Punishing bad behavior with poverty/destitution? No - the goal is rebuilding the social fabric of this country.

Jeff, that comment kind of bugs me. Considering that other people aren't "struck" the way that you are by the claim that our present system incentivizes and strongly encourages promiscuity, considering the fact that there is a factual difference of opinion here, perhaps you should retract it. After all, consider: If it is true that our present system is indeed encouraging and has encouraged a severe moral breakdown in certain communities, this is something that is of *substantive* concern. If the government programs are positively breaking down the social fabric of our society, this is of concern to conservatives qua conservatives. Why not acknowledge that factual differences of opinion make a difference to recommended solutions?

Now, it may well be that allowing people to suffer more as a consequence of their bad behavior is one recommended solution. But if so, again, this might be important to "rebuilding the fabric of society." Breaking the link between cause and effect is a huge problem for the social breakdown of society. It harms real people. I've often referred to a column by Theodore Dalrymple in which he talks about a woman who keeps shacking up with violent boyfriends. They trash her apartments and beat her up. The state gives her new appliances and fixes the apartments again and again after the boyfriend breaks them. She keeps calling the violent boyfriends from the hospital where she's being patched up after they beat her. Dalrymple asks a third-world resident doctor, "Is her problem poverty?" The resident doctor answers that it is not poverty. It is a spiritual problem. This is something to consider very seriously, Jeff, as a _substantive_ matter: Continually enabling misery-inducing behavior hurts the people it's intended to help. You can use prejudicial language ("punishing bad behavior with poverty") all you like. But as long as people are infantilized by having their on-going bad behavior subsidized, we're hurting them. Parents should know that. Parents do know that. If your kid goes out and breaks his bike through carelessness and you just keep buying him a new one, he's never going to learn. Only in this case the spiritual degradation that Dalrymple chronicles in the British welfare state, where no one is destitute but many are dependent and continue in cycles of self-destructive behavior, is much worse than having a broken bicycle. More like having a broken life. This is not a "procedural" matter. It's a matter of the good both of society and of real people.

It bears thinking about. And in the course of thinking about it, I would hope that your responses to your fellow conservatives on such issues would turn out somewhat different.

Not much time to respond at the moment, Mike T., but I like this idea. I also think you'll find that it doesn't change much in terms sexual behavior. The claim that welfare mothers are promiscuous so they can have babies in order get more welfare money just strikes me as a political fabrication. Maybe there are some who do that, but it can't be anything like a majority.

That's not what we're arguing, Jeff. What we're saying is that welfare changes their perception of the consequences to being far less severe. Think of it like this... If robbing liquor stores suddenly got punished with a $500 fine and 40 hours of community service, it wouldn't so much encourage people to become liquor store robbers as make many would-be liquor store robbers decide the cost is really not that big of a deal. Ergo, why not take a risk?

** wouldn't make most people not predisposed to thinking robbing liquor stores actually become liquor store robbers.

Jeff, as I have mentioned before, the elephant in the room here is that the lower classes have a lower time preference by nature than most of the middle and upper class people. That means they're already fighting against inner mechanisms which make them more prone to short-term thinking. Throw in welfare, and you have instant shock absorbing for many of their bad choices.

If the government had programs with free clinics, charity thrift stores, etc. where those institutions would directly give goods to support the children (thus the mother never has discretion over the state funds to spend them on herself) when the mother takes her kids there, we would only be haggling over budgetary matters. It would be a non-issue because the welfare funds would be no incentive to a normal person to have kids.

I don't hate the idea, but I don't like as much as Lydia and Jeff, and I certainly don't like the way the rationale is worded here. It's not obvious that welfare funds are exactly a positive incentive to have kids--they don't make you that much better off. Sometimes conservatives, when they talk this way, give the impression that they believe welfare mothers are getting richer and richer every time they have a baby, and it just isn't so. Rather, what automatic public assistance does do is to remove certain disincentives to having children out of wedlock, by softening (without eliminating, much less reversing) the impoverishing effect of fatherlessness. Direct material assistance in the form of food and clothing would call up the exact same sort of moral hazard, if it were not backed up by any real assessment of desert.

Also, there are broader consequences which ought to be matters of concern here too--incidence of theft, assault, murder, etc. Those things are inflicted on the innocent as a direct consequence of the breakdown of civilization that goes hand-in-hand with mass illegitimacy and general familial anarchy. While we wring our hands over the (relatively short-run) consequences of dramatically changing public policy in these areas, it will be worth considering that the victims of the present state of affairs include people who have not acted irresponsibly at all.

We need to think about parental advice here as well. Would we have as many series of mother-mother-mother-headed households in the American underclass if we didn't have grandmothers who treat pregnancy in their daughters as a matter of course? And would we have as many grandmothers who do so if it weren't for the welfare set-up?

Also, as one article I was reading recently put it, the perverse incentives may have more impact upon very young people. Teenage girls who see this as a normal "life track" and as a way to obtain faux "independence," setting up their own "household," are less likely to stay the course and finish school and resist the influence of their boyfriends. It's not as though the teen years are the most rational, and that is true of all classes.

All it takes is the victim to file for one and the abuser has no legal recourse to stop it from proceeding.

Some states do have limited ways to stop it or even dismiss it. Although I found out domestic violence rates in no-fault jurisdictions fell by nearly 30% after the law passed, so it apparently acts as a deterrent as well as an easier way to escape abusive marriages.

So, given the ugliness and recalcitrance of human nature as it is, and the impossibility of changing it by policy, what is the best we can reasonably expect to do, based on the concrete historical indicators available to us now?

Sage, wouldn't there be _more_ moral hazard to the extent that the mother could use assistance intended for her child for things for herself that wouldn't benefit the child? And I think this would be vastly increased if it could be used for something addictive and/or harmful such as drugs or alcohol.

Also, Sage (sorry for the third posting), direct help for clothes and food for the kiddos couldn't possibly be perceived as helping a teenage girl to set up her own establishment separately from her parents/mother. If she wasn't able to do so before having illegitimate kids, giving the kids clothes and food wouldn't make her more able to do so.

"human behavior is not ruled by money alone, or even primarily. Somehow the Left and the 'Right' in this country have got the idea that money creates all problems and solves all problems."

We've managed to separate morality from economics while simultaneously reducing man to homo economicus. Not a great recipe for producing or maintaining a society's social fabric.

"We won't get the right answers until we start asking the right questions."

Neither the mainstream Left nor the mainstream Right wants to hear these questions, let alone entertain them. One expects this from the Left. The Right is very disappointing here, however, as such a mentality betrays its own intellectual patrimony. Of course the American Right isn't particularly knowledgeable about its patrimony -- it seems to think that conservatism started with Reagan. These questions would not have appeared strange to earlier conservatives, but the ascendancy of the libertarian-leaning neocons in the 80s and after makes them seem that now.

2) Nice Marmot -- get your conservative intellectual history straight! The neocons were never particularly libertarian leaning, especially in the 80s (Irving Kristol famously wrote his essay "Two Cheers for Capitalism" for a reason). It was the actual libertarians who slowly but surely moved the Republicans and the neoconservatives (along with old-fashioned Reagan conservatives) who believed in fusionism in a more libertarian-leaning direction over the past 25 years or so. I would argue that this is partly a result of their arguments (especially their excellent Constitutional work) and partly a result of the failures of "big government" conservatism to accomplish the ends that Jeff C. is so interested in talking about (i.e. No Child Left Behind is a failure that just grew the power of a federal bureaucracy, TARP locked in "too big to fail", our debt has grown dramatically, etc., etc.)

The first generation neo-cons may have been disinclined to go the libertarian route, given their leftist background, but the more recent neocons were less defensive against libertarian-leaning ideas. Libertarianism would have had a far lesser impact on the Reagan- and post-Reagan era GOP if the neocons hadn't gained the ascendancy. I can't, for instance, see William Kristol writing an essay called "Two Cheers for Capitalism."

Jonah Goldberg, who I guess would be considered by some to be a neocon although really doesn't fit the bill since he just grew up in a conservative home and has been a political conservative all his life had some interesting thoughts after he wrote Liberal Fascism. In essence, he said the process of writing the book and then debating the ideas in the book with progressives/liberals made him more libertarian -- by reading all that early 20th Century history about Wilson, Dewey, Croly and the Progressives and their attack on the Constitution and federalism he came to believe more and more that our current predicament was due to a willingness of the modern GOP to 'make peace' with the welfare state and use the federal government (and to a lesser extent state and local governments) to solve certain social problems when it should be looking to individuals, families, churches, civic institutions, etc. to solve those same problems (or should fight back against the idea that the problem exists in the first place).

For me, I would say I have moved in a similar fashion partly as a result of domestic events but even more so as a result of foreign events -- the persecution of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ in a place like Iraq has a way of concentrating the mind about the wisdom of messing around with govnerments in the Middle-East. At least in our modern wimpy culture that is scared of acting like an imperial power should act. But that is a story for another day and another post...

Rather, what automatic public assistance does do is to remove certain disincentives to having children out of wedlock, by softening (without eliminating, much less reversing) the impoverishing effect of fatherlessness.

Yeah, we know Sage, that is exactly what we were saying to Jeff. (Not that welfare is actually a positive incentive that makes women enthusiastic about becoming unwed mothers)

Post a comment

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If
your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same
comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.

Reverse the order of the digits in 31, then type the answer using letters instead of numbers, all lower case. (required):